Photo Albums

Noteworthy Photography

Burning Flags PressThe website of Glen E. Friedman. Renowned for both his work with musicians like Fugazi, Minor Threat, Public Enemy, the Beastie Boys, Slayer (and many, many more) as well as his groundbreaking documentation of the burgeoning skateboard phenomenon in the late `70's, Glen has been privvy to (and has summarily captured on film) some of the coolest stuff ever. He's also an incredibly insightful and nice guy to boot.

SoHo Blues - Photography by Allan TannenbaumAllan Tannenbaum is a local photographer who has been everywhere and shot everything, from members of Blondie hanging out at the Mudd Club through the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center on September 11th. You could spend hours on this site, and I have.

Robert Otter PhotographsAmazing vintage photographs of New York City, specifically my own neighborhood, Greenwich Village.

Big Laughs

The Weblog of Spumco's John K.The weblog of cartoonist John Kricfalusi, crazed mind and frantic pencil behind the original "Ren & Stimpy," as well as "The Goddamn George Liquor Show." Surreal, unapologetic, uncompromising genius.

July 07, 2017

Because I’m a complete geek, I follow FansRamones on Instagram, who today posted this photograph of da brudders waffling about in front of a gazebo-styled bandstand that instantly struck a chord with me.

FansRamones didn’t post any credit or background, but I’m going to suggest that this is the same London bandstand that appears in both the video for “Typical Girls” by the Slits and, later, the one that appeared on the sleeve of the ominous industrial opus that is Horse Rotorvator by COIL. Here are both now.

and...

Fact Magazine (and they should know, one assumes) describes the location, in relation to the sleeve of Horse Rotorvator, thusly...

The cover features a seemingly innocent photo of the Regent’s Park bandstand,which had a few years earlier been the scene of an IRA bomb that killed three soldiers and their horses. A very dark joke from a very bleak and dark time and a portent of the music contained within.

June 23, 2017

In the wake of posting the solution to the Misfits quandary, I was going to leave it at that, but then I learned that today is Glenn Danzig's birthday, so figured I'd go the extra mile, especially since I had the afternoon off. As such, here, once again, is the cover of the Max's Kansas City bootleg (featuring a distortion of Lowit's original shot...

And here's that spot -- West 11th at Washington Street -- today. The concrete lip and steps are gone.

June 22, 2017

Sorry for the delay in closing the loop on this one, but it actually ended up coming together faster than I’d expected.

After doing that rudimentary stroll around the West Village with my kids and coming up empty (although, it turns out, we were very close), Flaming Pablum-friend Chung Wong got on the case and landed the plane. Once again, I’m respecting the wishes of photographer Roxanne Lowit and not posting the original photos, but if you click back on my original post on the subject, you can see where those images have been posted elsewhere on the `net. For the sake of reference, though, you have my daughter's rendering of the spot above, and the sleeve of the Max's Kansas City bootleg below.

Long story short: The spot in question is West 11th Street at Washington Street.

In any case, here’s Chung’s take:

After Bob backtracked to Duane Park for Walter Steding location ID (similar background today, but different foreground today), I got inspired to backtrack to places on Washington St again that had similar background buildings where the foreground was different today.

I too at first did not think the corner entrance was at 341 W 11th st at Washington St.

The background buildings on 11th St looked similar.

The only old NYPL photo i found with corner "steps" only showed a partial view.

Breakthrough came with the Edmund V Gillon Jr photo from 1970-85 showing the old entrance below.

As can see in the Gillon photo above, even the graffiti matches up. My kids and I had walked past this building and discounted it because the steps are now gone, the door is now a window and it’s gate off. That’s what happens over the course of forty-something years, I guess.

Oddly enough, I’ve actually been inside that building. The little sister of a college friend once rented a studio apartment in that building circa 1992, and I remember getting in a very heated debate about the merits of Adam & the Ants therein.

More recently, a latter iteration of the Misfits reconvened for two dates last year, and are rumored to be considering further reunion shows. Guitarist Bobby Steele, last I heard, is still living in the East Village and still fronting the umpteenth version of The Undead. Drummer Joey Image left the Misfits after the Night of the Living Dead EP, and later played with The Whorelords (who I fleetingly discussed here) and later played with bands with chuckle-worthy names like Human Buffet, The Mary Tyler Whores, Jersey Trash and The Strap-Ons. He currently plays with an outfit called Forever Horror/Horror Forever.

I never heard back from Roxanne Lowit’s assistant. Lowit, meanwhile, was the subject of her own documentary in 2015, although I don’t believe the Misfits were ever mentioned. I don’t know if she still lives/works in the West Village.

June 18, 2017

This post ended up being a great deal more complicated than I’d originally envisioned.

As with so many other “photo quizzes” I’ve posted before (like The Stranglers in Gramercy Park, Kraut on East 7th Street, Tom Verlaine on Vesey Street,Joe Jackson’s bar-booth, that long and agonizing search for that Lunachicks shot, to name but a few), there had been a notable couple of images by a certain photographer that had captured my imagination, specifically — just as with the examples above — featuring a favorite band of mine depicted in what I assumed was a location right here in Manhattan. When I felt I had enough of a narrative in place to flesh out a proper backstory and launch another sleuthing investigation for the purposes of a post, I figured I’d cut right to the chase. I gleaned that the photographer in question was still among the living, so I reached out to her by way of her official website. Given the inanely trivial nature of my query (something only the truly geeky fanboy might care about), I did not expect a reply. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got one.

Seemingly amused by my interest in the specificities of the images in question, a representative of that photographer wrote back and confirmed that yes, indeed, the photographer remembered the shoot and counts those images as some of her favorites. The rep also gave me some massive clues as to where the shots may have been taken. That said, he mentioned that he was out of the studio, but that he’d do a little research when he got back. Greatly encouraged and thankful, I wrote back to see if it might be okay if I repurposed a couple of the original images for the purposes of establishing context here on my stupid blog.

There, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet famously exclaimed, was the rub.

As is entirely her right, the photographer in question does not give me permission to publish her images on my blog.

Now, that is, of course, a huge bummer, but I totally get it. They are her pictures, no one else’s. As such, I’ve had to be a little more resourceful and employ a few workarounds, while still respecting the wishes of the photographer.

END OF PREAMBLE

Back in 1979, an intrepid photographer named Roxanne Lowit was drafted for a shoot with an outfit named The Misfits. While they’d only been active for a couple of years, by this point, the band’s ranks had already gone through a number of changes. The iteraiton Lowit was intent on capturing –- featuring vocalist Glenn Danzig and bassist Jerry Only, flanked by guitarist Bobby Steele and drummer Joey Image -– had only congealed in December of the previous year. In January of 1979, that line-up would record three songs, released the following June, that would arguably become the band’s finest hour, that being the “Horror Business” single (above). Shortly afterwards, drummer Image would split, and guitarist Steele would be axed (thus freed to start his own similarly inclined combo, The Undead). But, at the time of Lowit’s photoshoot, the “Horror Business” version of the Misfits was, more or less, a solid unit of happy little punky campers.

Now, as fate would have it, the reason for Lowit’s shoot remains undetermined. Was she drafted by a magazine? Was she recruited by Plan 9 (the band’s own indie label, which was ultimately just Danzig and Only) to shoot promo photos? I’m not sure. Regardless, Lowit ended up taking several photographs of the band during that session that have since gone on to become iconic images. Presumably captured over the course of one evening, Lowit’s pictures of the Misfits perfectly capture the band’s richly cultivated sensibility.

I cannot remember when I first spied the first captivating shot, but more recently, one can see a distorted representation of it on the cover of the “Max’s Kansas City” bootleg vinyl 7”. Here’s a shot of me holding same.

The image is of the Misfits standing on the concrete lip of a sharp, city corner. I remember originally thinking it looked like a scene from a film from that very year, that being Walter Hill’s urban gang epic, “The Warriors.” They boys are all in black leather, with Only and Danzig dressed up in their undead finery, and drummer Joey Image wearing some rather incongruously frivolous stripy trousers. You can see a slightly better representation of the original photo here.

What’s haunted me about this photograph is, of course — the location. It looks like a familiar spot — maybe a loading dock? — but I have yet to pinpoint it. There’s a bit of graffiti scrawled behind Jerry Only (which is invariably long gone) and some very weathered steps beneath them.

Then, I found a bigger clue. A straight-on shot by Lowit at the same spot. You can see that picture here, but for the purposes of this post, I drafted my daughter to illustrate a rendering of the photo.

This photo has way more information to work with. Note the distinctive trim on the step Danzig’s boots are resting on, and the flat, almost shiny plane on the wall behind the band, around the corner from the concrete lip they’re pictured standing on in the other shot?

After I found this photo, that’s when I reached out to Roxanne Lowit, explaining my curiosity as to where the shoot took place. Was it even in Manhattan (given that the band are technically from Lodi, New Jersey)? Did Ms. Lowit — who is now a renowned fashion photographer — even remember taking these pictures? At the time, the Misfits would not have been that that well known.

In surprisingly short order, an assistant of Lowit’s wrote back, saying:

Roxanne Lowit absolutely remembers this shoot as these are some of her favorite photo's. Hopefully I will be back in the studio next week and will look at the originals and should be able to give you an exact location...for now I can tell you West Village around Washington street near Bethune Street where Roxanne had her studio.

Armed with that information and a print out of the straight-on photo, I set out one Saturday afternoon a few weeks back with my kids to try and find the spot. We trekked all around the area of the West Village in question, but nothing really revealed itself. Granted, in the in almost-forty years (!!!) since these photographs were taken, downtown Manhattan has changed somewhat radically and it’s entirely conceivable that the building in question has been razed to accommodate any number of new developments.

As such, while my suspicion that the spot in question is somewhere around the Westbeth Artists Community, I was unable to find the exact location.

June 13, 2017

If you’d ever have suggested that I’d post two entries devoted to Walter Steding back-to-back, I’d have verily scoffed at you. But, these are strange times, so here we are.

Sorry for another slowdown. My office held an “offsite” last week, which gobbled up a huge pile of time and energy, not least in that it meant we lost three days of office-time, meaning my department has been scrambling to catch up ever since. On other fronts, my wife just started a new job, and my kids are shortly getting out of school. There’s a lot of crap going on, so I haven’t been able to post as much as I’d like. I have some cooler stuff in the works, I promise, but please sit tight.

In the short term, however, in the wake of that last post about Walter Steding’s video for “Secret Spy,” I stumbled upon this other video of his, that being the title track to his album, Dancing in Heaven. Rife with Steding’s signature violin-playing and some very of-their-era electronic beats, “Dancing in Heaven” (shot in 1982) finds Walter and a gaggle of breakdancers holding court in what looks like a patch of New York City public space, with Walter overseeing proceedings on what looks like either a flagpole pedstal or bit of statuery.

In short order, I became predictably intrigued – where was this clip shot?

Watch the video first.

I posted it on Facebook and tagged my sleuthing pals Chung Wong and Bob Egan of PopSpots. Each gamely weighed in.

Chung wrote:

With the circular benches, traffic and office i thought it might have been TriBeCa Park by Beach St. But still trying to figure out what that column or pole on a pedestal is. Park benches look different but a background building looks similar.

To my mind, TriBeCa Park – which I walk through every day on my way to work – seemed to make sense, given its proximity to Steding-centric spots like the former site of the Mudd Club at 77 White Street and the formerly arty bohemia of SoHo. Trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be a matching flagpole there, much less –as Chung noted – any curved benches.

Evidently a member of that same clique that hung out with the No Wave bohos at joints like the Mudd Club and Hurrah, Steding utilized a violin in a manner not entirely unlike Laurie Anderson, seemingly seeking to re-imagine the instrument outside of the stuffy parameters of classical music. As a solo act, Steding actually opened up for bands at CBGB like Blondie, Suicide and the Ramones, which is a testament to how open-minded the early NYC scene was before all things “punk” became codified by uniforms and stereotypes.

In any case, I stumbled upon this clip of Steding’s from his 1982 album, Dancing in Heaven. The song, “Secret Spy,” was produced by Blondie’s Chris Stein, but the video below was evidently co-produced by Andy Warhol, finding our Walter sawing away on his violin on a west side pier off the Hudson River, when such places were more traveled by cruisers and thrill-seekers, and not stroller-pushers and sunbathers.

June 03, 2017

Appropos of nothing at all, I was recently perusing the epidsodes of “Here’s the Thing,” Alec Baldwin’s podcast series. I realize some people consider Baldwin a divisive figure, but I personally think he’s hilarious and insightful (although, truthfully, I think his Trump impersonation is actually kinda weak). Regardless, I feel he’s got a lot of interesting things to say, and I share a lot of his tastes. Case in point being his interview with Flaming Pablum favorite, Joe Jackson, the formerly “Angry Young Man of the New Wave,” not shitty Michael’s shitty dad.

If you’ve not heard it and you’re a fan, it’s really worth your time. Jackson comes across as wittily erudite as you might expect, but his penchant for being essentially a bit of a prickly curmudgeon is undiminished. As he also expressed in his bio some years back, Jackson ruminates on the discomfort he feels when he's accosted by his fans, which prompts Baldwin to recount an anecdote about approaching Joe Jackson back in the 80’s at an East Village joint called -– I think -– Binnybon? Does that ring any bells with anyone? In any case, Alec went up to Jackson and professed his fandom, and the notoriously thorny Brit ex-pat singer/songwriter gave him a brusque cold shoulder. That totally resonated with me, as I had my own awkward encounter with Joe Jackson a few years back. The man just does not enjoy the unsolicited company of his public, it seems.

In any case, that podcast got me revisiting an album of Jackson’s I'd not considered in a while, ironically one I do not own or really know at all. Night and Day II came out in 2000, its title alluding kinship with Jackson’s breakout album from 1982, i.e. the one that spawned "Steppin' Out," that being Night and Day.

The reason I started thinking about Night and Day II is because of its cover, which features a lovely nocturnal shot of Manhattan. Being that I walk up and down the length of the avenue in question five days a week, I recognize the depicted locale as West Broadway at Duane Street. But something about it still bugged me. Here's the album cover now. Click to enlarge.

Yeah, obviously, those are the twin towers of the World Trade Center, not to mention 7 World Trade Center in front of same. You might remember 7 WTC as the building that collapsed on September 11, 2001, despite not having been hit by any planes, a curious circumstance that led it to become the center of any number of conspiracy theories. Today, I work in the building that stands in that fallen structure's footprint. On one of my walks home from work, this week, I tried to replicate the album cover shot. Here `tis...

As you can see, not too much has really changed beyond the afore-cited buildings, although the shops and restaurants that lined both sides of that strip of West Broadway (between Duane and Reade Streets) have changed quite a bit in the past 17 years.

But still something was wrong. Then it hit me.

If you scroll up and look at the Jackson sleeve again, you'll see that the cab Joe's in appears to be heading left down West Broadway as it exits Duane Street. Therein lies the problem. Duane Street runs a one-way direction from west to east, meaning that the driver behind the wheel of Joe's cab has been driving against the traffic.

May 23, 2017

I shouldn't have been surprised, but my friend Chung Wong (a name you might recognize from similar photo quizzes I've posted here) connected the dots on this one, aided considerably -- one assumes -- by the fact that he can read traditional Chinese characters.

After posting this on Facebook, Chung dove right in to discern that the signage in between punkily pulchritudinous Wendy and implausibly tall Richie Stotts translated to: Shanghai New China Barber Shop. He then noted that there was a Chung Wah Barber Shop by Joe's Shanghai down on Pell Street. An initial Google search on my part brought this up.

This didn't quite match up, however, given some minor architectural discrepancies and the more telling lack of a fire hydrant in front (although, conceivably, a fire hydrant might have been removed since 1982).

Chung then chimed back in, saying that there had been a restaurant called Temple Garden, The Best Szechuan, Hunan & Mandarin Cuisine in New York's Chinatown at 16 Pell Street. If you look above the beret of drummer T.C. Tolliver on the far right, you can see the neon letters EMP GARD, which leant Chung's hunch some serious credence.

I did a Google Map search from 2011, and came up with this image...

This looks more likely, but ... again ... no hydrant.

Chung then hit me with this...

Look hard, and you can see the barber pole...

...further noting that the area around the poll looks like a complete match...

Lastly, Chung found that errant hydrant in front of 18 Pell (then called Ester Eng) and the barber pole. This photograph is by Christian Skrein, snapped in 1966. The hydrant in question is on the bottom right hand.

Look closely, and you might notice a giant cigarette in the background. Evidently, that's because there was an initiative, at the time, to christen the neighborhood as "a smoking district" of town. Make of that what you will.

Today, 16 Pell is a foot-rub joint. 18 Pell, meanwhile, is still a hair stylist's place, called Hair Le Pell. How fancy!

As far as the Plasmatics, towering guitarist Richie Stotts still works in rock, albeit in a different capacity -- he's a geologist. Rhythm guitarist Wes Beech works in music retail and production. Drummer T.C. Tolliver is still a gigging musician. According to Wikipedia, bassist Chris "Junior" Romanelli is now a practicing attorney.

Wendy O. Williams took her own life in 1998 at the age of 48.

Here's the lone music video made during the Coup d'Etat era, "The Damned" (no relation to the British punk band), which naturally features Wendy driving a school bus through a wall of television sets .... as one does.

I didn’t think I’d be unveiling another post about the Plasmatics so soon after the last one, but I spotted a photo on Facebook that just begged for greater extrapolation, so here we go.

I know I just hinted about another impending photo quiz (involving The Misfits), but this is not that. Like I said, that one’s a little more complicated, but all will be revealed. This one is pretty tough too, but for different reasons. Enough preamble.

It’s 1982 when Capitol Records unleashes Coup d’Etat, the third full LP by the Plasmatics, on a largely disintered world. Capitol themselves would also lose interest, dropping the band almost immediately after the record’s release. Showcasing a pointedly more metallic side to the band's oeuvre, the record makes previous efforts by the Plasmatics sound like easy-listening. Frontwoman Wendy O. Williams’ vocal chords are virtually unrecognizable in their larynx-shredding attack. Despite the legitimately bold new direction (the metal/punk crossover hadn’t officially been much of a thing, as yet, at least not here in the States), some of the same problems remain, and Coup d’Etat essentially becomes the band’s final album. There will be a later record with the legend Plasmatics stamped on it, that being 1987’s Maggots: The Record, but that will not feature original members like guitarist Richie Stotts. For all intents and purposes, Coup d’Etat is the largenly unsung band’s swan song.

Meanwhile, sequestered out amidst the leafy, Long Island byways of Quogue that summer, the petulant, 15-year-old me special-orders a copy of Coup d’Etat from a tiny, long-shuttered record store on Main Street in Westhampton Beach called Sam’s Record Shack. They order two copies. I bike over there and buy one, and they display the other copy in their window, and there it remains -– telllingly untouched and unpurchased -– until the shop’s demise about two years later.

While not quite as captivating, for me, as previous records like Beyond the Valley of 1984 and the Metal Priestess E.P. (their finest hour, as far as I’m concerned), I routinely blast tracks from Coup d’Etat in the house my family’s renting that summer, notably the suitably lumbering cover of Motorhead’s “No Class.” This practice does little to endear me to the rest of my family.

Around this same era, however, as alluded to in this post, I’m becoming less enthused by more conventional punk and metal bands and immersing myself more and more in hardcore punk. Stripped of the sensationalized shock-rock/showbiz antics of bands like The Plasmatics, hardcore punk is a leaner, faster, angrier form of expression that speaks directly to the frustrated adolescent psyche. Ultimately, it renders stuff like The Plasmatics obsolete.

Anyway, blah blah blah … why am I bringing up any of this ancient history now? Well, again, I spotted a certain photo of the Coup d’Etat-era Plasmatics on Facebook today in a larger format than I’d previously seen, and it begged a few questions.

I can’t find anything to verify this on the web, but if I’m not mistaken, the eye-catching cover of Coup d’Etat was shot on Charlotte Street in the South Bronx, although I cannot say I know who the photographer was. The particular location was allegedly chosen not because that neighborhood was the most conducisve to a big fuckoff tank, but rather because then President Ronald Reagan had made an appearance on that very spot (or in the vicinity) a couple of years earlier to chide his Democratic predecessor, Jimmy Carter, for failing to curb the encroachment of urban blight. I also want to say that KISS shot the frankly ludicrous video for “Lick It Up” on the same location, though probably not for the same reasons.

The photograph below, meanwhile, was presumably taken during the same shoot (given that the band is depicted sporting the same fetchingly distressed togs), but I’m going to speculate that it was snapped in Manhattan, specifically in -– WAIT FOR IT -– Chinatown.

I immediately assumed that shot was snapped on iconic Doyers Street. And while there is still a barber shop on that distinctive lane (notice the spinning barber’s pole above Wendy’s upstretched right arm?), it doesn’t visually match up, nor is there a hydrant nearby in 2017.

So, I’m putting it to you lot.

Now, there are several barber shops scattered around Chinatown, but 1982 was a long, goddamn time ago.

May 22, 2017

Sorry for the relative slowdown in service here, and I promise –- three posts about the late Mr. Cornell is indeed enough.

We’ve hit another busy patch, although our much-alluded initiative to find a new place to live has been put on ice for a little while as my wife prepares to acclimate to a new job, after which point we’ll revisit the perplexing dilemma.

In the interim, I do have another long-percolating photo quiz ala last year’s Lunachicks saga hopefully coming your way quite soon. It recently hit a few snags, but I hope to have something to put about it shortly.

Below is a tantalizing hint. Well, it’s only tantalizing if you give a shit about such things. Here’s hoping you will. Stand by…